With emerging new apps like digital wallets making online transactions more convenient and hassle-free, e-commerce companies can hope to increase their customer traffic significantly. “The true value of digital wallet goes beyond the transaction. Digital wallets have the potential to generate an unprecedented amount of customer transactional data. Service providers can harness this information to design engaging, contextual experiences for each stage of the customer’s interaction on the path to purchase. As the customer progresses through a transaction, service providers for instance, can leverage customer location and transaction data to “listen and respond” to customer’s needs in real-time– e.g. deliver personalized offers,” explains Srinivas Nidugondi, Senior Vice President and Head, Mobile Financial Solutions, Mahindra Comviva.

Mahindra Comviva,in collaboration with Ovum Consulting, has published a whitepaper tracing the growth and uptake of digital wallet services across developed and developing regions over the last 18 months.

The whitepaper examines why these services are becoming increasingly important, along with the benefits offered to customers and the overall ecosystem of operators, banks and merchants. It further highlights the growing trend amongst operators of inking partnerships and deploying white label platforms to enable merchant acquisition, transaction processing and functions pertaining to the role of trusted service manager.

“Realizing the benefits of a customer centric payments strategy requires an open platform that can seamlessly integrate with multiple systems. The underlying wallet delivery architecture must support an open services framework to integrate with payment networks, payment terminals, loyalty and personalization platforms. This drives acceptance at merchant locations, as well as allows consumers greater accessibility to more third-party services, such as price comparisons, offers and deals, accelerating consumer adoption”, he says.

Service providers can further accelerate the uptake of digital services by addressing critical issues like security, possible misuse of personal data and lack of information pertaining to the same. To overcome this, the whitepaper recommends that security credentials be made visible to customers by adopting a simple approach. Moreover, customers require adequate information pertaining to the benefits of using this service, particularly vis a vis other payment mechanisms.